How To Build a Web 2.0 Government?

UltraAyla writes "With the announcement that President-Elect Obama will record his weekly address as a YouTube video to be posted at Change.gov, questions arise as to how an Internet-fueled candidacy based in part on a platform of government openness can begin to use technology to make government transparent. Aside from popular Slashdot policies, such as Net Neutrality, how do you think government (either in the United States or elsewhere) can best utilize technology to engage the public and make government more transparent and accessible?" Reader Rick Zeman points out a related New York Times story about how Obama will have to give up some of his communications gadgets because of the Presidential Records Act. Despite that, he apparently hopes to be the first US president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office.

Comments

The medium is NOT the message

[petes_PoV]

The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.

If by accessible, you mean dumbing down the work of government to cartoon-form, with nothing more than a series of 5-second sound-bites, then good luck. But that's not government in action, it's a soap-opera.

Re:The medium is NOT the message

[caramelcarrot]

I think the point is more that the tedium can still be documented on a medium that is ideal for large abouts of tedious stuff - the internet - and then the interesting bits can be found and talked about. See what the UK group OpenSociety has done with www.theyworkforyou.com , like the processing of The Hansard into accessable form http://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?pid=10068&pop=1#n4

government open source efforts would be nice

[reusr1]

It would be nice if the government would start open sourcing all software projects developed within or for the government. It should be possible to cut development cost (states ultimately share the source code of some of their projects) and the projects payed by the people would be for the people.

Tools for gov.

[foniksonik]

Wikis for pending legislation.

Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top.

Use an issue tracker for existing legislation. Have a problem with a law? File a bug. It may be marked as trivial or may get fast tracked as a patch. Either way you know it's status and can organize to get that status changed if enough people agree with you.

Use RSS feeds to distribute Congressional hearing notes, comittee transcripts, and legislative votes.

   

Re:Tools for gov.

[langelgjm]

Wikis for pending legislation. Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top

I've thought of this before. Though, I wonder about the value of any of it.

/. has a pretty good moderation system, or at least it seems to me. But while it works a lot of the time, it also sucks a lot of the time. Comments that sound right, or that people want to be true, are modded up, regardless of whether they are actually true. Comments on legal matters are probably one of the best examples of this.

Of course, from time to time you'll have a trusted source say something (think NYCL), but there are many instances when I've seen factually incorrect information modded to +5 Informative and stay that way.*

Furthermore, I get the feeling we'll be more likely to see something like this: http://obamacto.org/ than a more complex moderation system. Note that at the time of posting, "repeal the DMCA" is the third ranked suggestion. Of course we all know the problems with the DMCA (anti-circumvention provisions come to mind first), but repealing it would also get rid of safe-harbor provisions. How many people who clicked "vote for" thought of that?

In any case, it's not as if legislators are just going to look at the top five things on the list and implement them. At least, one hopes not.

Where a moderation system would work well is in the thousands of public comments that are submitted to, say, the FCC when they ask for public comment. That way instead of a flood of inane commentary, then can see some highly ranked ideas first.

*If my own comment becomes an example of this, here is a disclaimer :-)

Re:Tools for gov.

[AnyoneEB]

The Metascore project (part of the Metagovernment project) is working on a moderation system that would work for a discussion of that scale, which may be interesting. I do not know if they will come up with a working solution, but it is worth looking at.

Re:Tools for gov.

[pacificleo]

" That way instead of a flood of inane commentary, then can see some highly ranked ideas first." Problem with suggested method is that it will eventually reduce to an exercise in sophistry [ never mind that even /. behave like that sometime] . IMHO most effective method of having a directly participative govt is to have a weighted voting system . where people get different number of votes on specific topic . an architect might get more votes on an issue related to urban planning than a n accountant . who might get a more votes on Finance matters . This enable a true meritocracy

Re:Tools for gov.

[foniksonik]

Regarding 'gaming' the comments, certainly there is room for this to happen but in all fairness this already happens - it's called Lobbying, except that it happens behind closed doors and out of the public eye. If people were to attempt this type of activity the Press would be all over it digging up the commenters background info and discovering who was trying to moderate up various views.

The idea was in fact exactly as you say regarding the FCC public comments... except that it would be centralized and available for all legislation.

What's great about a moderated comments system is that you get comments on the comments, and those are usually even more interesting than the original... so someone hits on a good topic, then others iterate on it.

A real how-to

[dino213b]

This is really simple: provide data feeds to the public -- from various government collection sources.

End of story. We don't need the government to spend months, or years even, building websites which dumb data down for us. Give us the raw data feeds and let us create mashups, interactive content and let people make their own judgment based on it. Sure, some sites might need heavy design (such as educational loan repayment sites, etc).

A prime example of this data feed is something like DC's http://data.octo.dc.gov/

And what can people do with that? Well, something like this:

Drunken sailor map

Re:A real how-to

[Silona]

exactly - I don't want the govt interpretation because I want to know the bias. There is no such thing as interpretation without bias I prefer to at least know what that bias is IE Cato vs ACLU Cheers! Silona

a request

[omar.sahal]

The only problem I had with Obama was his vague speeches (hope, blah blah change etc) it seemed to say nice sounding things but not give any detail (lots of room for being weaselly letter on).
change.gov seemed 48 hours after Obama was elected to have (under the title agenda) a detailed policy list. This however disappeared quite quickly. Another site however seems to have all his policy details but is by a group called Obama for America, who are they, please post if you have any detail.

Re:comm theory

[omeomi]

unless your theory happens to be that of Marshall McLuhan, in which case the technology (medium) defines (is) the communication (the message)

The death of the sound bite

[symbolset]

For too long the public policy of the US has been weighed and measured in three second clips cherry picked by the media to push their own agenda. Presidents have given addresses, but unless you block out the time to listen to the whole message at the time it was given then the republication and further dissemination were prohibited by copyright. What was left were tiny snippets chosen, perhaps to educate and inform but more often chosen to catch attention and spark a fire for pundits to fan into a heated argument between commercials. This doesn't serve the intent of the policy makers at all, and does nothing to improve public policy.

There is an opportunity here for the President Elect to circumvent the established media and get his message out in a way that preserves the whole message and conveys more substance than can be carried by a sound bite. This is a risk - policies as a whole can be unloved - but at least people will discuss them as whole policies and not be as swayed by a single implementation detail.

Getting more public information into the hands of the people is also a good thing. The government of the US collects, stores and transmits huge volumes of information. They pay for research, they study trends, they map and photograph, illustrate and write code and generate a lot of other content. Putting more of this online in open formats is a great way to allow the people to share in the progress and become more informed if they choose. It's also an opportunity for the people to take advantage of the information to cross-correlate, rethink and discover what gems might be in the tailings of this information mine, since publications of the US government generally aren't covered by copyright. This could promote a great deal of progress.

Government agencies at all levels are more and more making their services - information, permitting, licensing, and so on - accessible over the Internet. This makes interacting with government much easier and less prone to error. It makes government more accessible to the handicapped and the poor. The Internet doesn't "close", so people can interact with the government at times of day that are available to them. Accelerating this trend would be a good thing, but we need to be aware of a potential issue: if the Internet is a face of government, then access to that interaction must be preserved and protected. If the Internet becomes the road to City Hall then local broadband monopolies cannot continue to be the gatekeepers, choosing which region is deserving of bandwidth and which is not.

Public Servant Ratings

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how good this idea is, but what if there was a website that people could visit to rate/provide feedback about public servants? If you have a complaint (or less frequently, a compliment) about a public employee, ask for their employee number, visit the website, and post a comment. Given adequate safeguards (which I don't pretend to know) to ensure only real comments are posted, the feedback could be used in the employees evaluations.

I think this would quickly pinpoint the truly obnoxious would be 'public masters' and provide a means to weed them out of the government.

Ever had a horrible experience with somebody at the DMV, what about airport security? It sure would be nice to have something to push back against that sort of behavior.

Re:That is soooooo... 2006

[curunir]

You jest, but Government really is a legacy system, written ~230 years ago by developers who have long since moved on. The people who came after them have been generally fearful of making any substantive changes, opting instead for minor revisions and, when new features became necessary, generally attempting to follow the techniques in the original framework without really understanding why those development strategies were used in the first place.

So what we have now is a maintenance nightmare. It was bad in 2000, but over the last 8 years, the government has relied almost entirely on contractors who have generally ignored any existing infrastructure and have re-written many things from scratch in languages that they've basically made up as they've felt the needed to. They've done this without any regard for stability, performance or maintenance going forward. They knew they'd be gone by 2009 and the problems they were leaving behind would have to be solved by other developers. As a result, we have one of the most resource hungry governments in the world, and the performance is pretty crappy. For example, there's a job that's been running for 6 years and still hasn't completed yet. No one is really sure what the job is supposed to do, but so far it seems that the only thing it's done is used a ton of resources to hack into another system and try to install another copy of our system in its place. The newly hired lead developer has indicated that he's planning to kill that job, albeit without the necessary '-9' flag, so that's hopefully going to free up some much needed resources.

It's at this point that the managers in charge should start looking at best-of-breed solutions from the rest of the world and trying to implement them. There are much more efficient ways to get things done that what we currently have, and we should begin by choosing a much more proven, stable and performant platform on which to build our government. And we should shift our security focus partially away from the external threats that have so far been our main focus. Instead, we should look at trying to eliminate at least some of the viruses running in our current system.

We need to face the fact that we've got the Windows Vista of governments. We had the Windows XP of governments before the last administration tried to entirely re-build our systems. They placed a priority on DRM and the appearance of security and generally built a system that requires more resources to run than we have. They've made cosmetic changes to distract people from realizing that the underlying infrastructure is pretty crappy. It may look current and modern, but at its core, it was written for an entirely different time and for an entirely different target audience. And its fundamentally unable to deal with the viruses that exist today (*cough*lobbyists*cough*).

We should be looking at ways to run Socialism (the OS X of governments...very user-centric, less gets done but people are generally happier, though it's hard to figure out exactly why that is considering how much they're paying for it) or Libertarianism (the Linux of governments...almost nothing is done for you, but if you're determined enough, you can make it exactly what you'd like and have a lot more resources left over for doing the things you want to do). Both of those platforms hold more promise going forward.

Re:I say "web government" is long overdue

[Darundal]

If the majority vote was the sole decider on every issue, with "advisers" giving people suggestions as to how they should vote, you will end up with heavily bribed advisers (moreso than congresscritters and other government drones), a constant barrage of campaigns with similar content to John McCains "Obama wants to give kindergartners comprehensive sex education" ad or the funny face net neutrality ad, and people voting for issues because they don't like to leave blanks on ballots. Or, in short, the current system, only slower, more corrupt, and less competent.

Very Difficult To Do - And too easy to undo

[ChronoFish]

I was the lead developer at the Rhode Island Secretary of state for several years. The administration I came in under was very pro-technology and allowed the IT department to explore Open Source, web services, REST APIs, RSS Feeds, etc. The later administration was very technology leary, felt that the IT department had too much power, and refused to provide real leadership. All the hard work that made the department a leader in technology and openness evaporated in period of months.

The Open Source technologies were done away with, the developers and system guys all left, and the IT department collapsed.

It is now all outsourced with no plans to expand their offerings, and have had to scale back on existing services.

I loved it till I hated it.

-CF

WTF? No feed?

[Gible]

WTF? Change.gov doesn't have an rss/atom feed? ..or am I blind?

Securing email

[blitzkrieg3]

From TFA:

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

"They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked," said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. "The nature of the president's job is that others can use e-mail for him."

What's wrong with PGP? Surely they could bring a consultant in from the NSA or something to advise in this. I have a hard time believing that I can send secure emails and yet they aren't able to do so presidential level.

Re:Securing email

[John Hasler]

How do you guarantee that the recipients of your secure emails keep them secure?

Re:That is soooooo... 2006

[Reality Master 101]

You've got the right general idea, but the wrong analogy.

The proper analogy is that the original government was like Unix -- small, elegant, efficient, and decentralized. As society has gotten more complex, we've grafted on more and more onto the basic framework, making it far more complex. But at the core, it's still the right way to do things.

Windows Vista is Socialism -- an attempt to "cast off the past legacy of Unix" (analogous to Capitalism) and rewrite things to be all things to all users. And what you get is a gigantic resource hog that barely functions, but convinces people through pretty, shiny colors and pretty, shiny marketing that you have total freedom (e.g., "life without walls" or whatever their propaganda slogan is this month). And through ever increasing processing CPU power (/ever increasing debt spending), people believe that it works.

OS/X is the freedom of Unix, but with an attempt to add a user friendliness to the process -- kind of like Obama (though the jury is out on how much he actually believes in freedom, but let's go with it). Linux is more like a Libertarian government -- total freedom, but total responsibility as well, and only a geek's view of taste and beauty (in other words, little taste at all).

Do the simple things first

[scamper_22]

I'm sure we can all think up grand ideas, but I'd be surprised if we even get the basic things done. Here's my basic list.

1. Open data formats and default to information accss. A simple example is transit. All transit services should be REQUIRED to support google's open route/scheduling format. Similarly, instead of having to request that information, it should be provided by default (published at some accessible location). The same should be done for statistics, census data... Now it might be wise to use institutions like the IEEE to decide on an open standard of mulitple ones exist or something along those lines.

2. Make it easy for people to donate for specific causes. THis could be a preapproved list of charities or causes that would be accessible for donation from a government maintained website.

3. Enforce security practices. This might include trampling a bit on the private sector. However, we have safety regulations for other products. Why not information security regulation. Things like mandating chip cards or pin numbers on cards... Perhaps some data center regulations...

Re:Direct democracy

[IamTheRealMike]

Why aim so low? We have the technology (almost) to let anybody vote on any bill put before the Government. Of course most people wouldn't vote on most issues, as they are often quite inane - at least judging by the UK Parliament. To stop minority interests taking over then, you allow (indeed, enforce) that everybody votes on every issue - but to stop it becoming overwhelming, allow people to delegate their vote to arbitrary other people.

By default then everybodies vote would be delegated to their elected representative, unless they chose to vote themselves. But I could easily set up a more complex scheme, in which my accountant votes for me on matters of tax, I handle technology related votes myself and my representative takes all the rest.

This is actual direct democracy, with the only remaining problem being inability to directly submit legislation from any citizen. There are truly some scalability and social/educational issues with that, but it's what we should aim for.

Re:That is soooooo... 2006

[Zero__Kelvin]

I'm sorry to hear that you have no experience with modern Linux distributions. If you had, you would have seen a real world example of Linux kicking Vista's anaemic ass in the GUI/Prettiness/Usability domains. (And this video is OLD. The disparity is MUCH greater now that KDE4 w/ Compiz-fusion has matured.)

And lest you seek to spread such an absurd myth that Windows is "easier" than Linux, handing the average user two laptops with no OS, a copy of Vista to install, and a copy of a truly great Linux distribution (like Mandriva, e.g.) they will have no more success with one than the other.

My 72 year old Mother has been using linux for more than 5 years. She is very vociferous about her joy in not having to use that horrible Windows anymore (and I'm NOT there to hold her hand.)

Log activity automatically?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we could build a system to automatically record all sorts of events in the bureaucracy. If everything went through computers, this would be easy, as well as much more efficient. Then build an online interface to access these events, maybe a query mechanism.

Then, someone could set up a sort of social system around these events, by allowing users to vote for events that they see as important. Then they could harness the masses to find interesting or controversial government activity.

The only creepy thing is if we become to dependent on this system. What if it goes down? Or is purposefully crashed?

Re:The question everyone wants to know...

[ChameleonDave]

No, not Linux, but his laptop is a Mac, so he is running a form of Unix, at least.

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned so far!

Re:That is soooooo... 2006

[inKubus]

I would like to see some good version control. If you look at the congressional record, it's full of crap like "Strike out the sixth sentence of chapter 12, paragraph 348, replacing with: 'b. except where already addressed under USC 90.01.23'"

WTF? I would like something like Trac where you can click on ANY statement in the US Code and see instantly:

What changes have been made, over time
Who sponsored the changes
Who voted for, against, present
Links to related code, as needed
Public opinion related to the law
Press releases by public offices/personel about the law

All with a nice Google timeline kindof interface.

Re:That is soooooo... 2006

[deranged unix nut]

Add a Google Alerts type thing to that so I can be notified any time a bill is up for a vote by my representative and any time anyone proposes a bill on copyright law and I think we instantly make government a LOT more transparent and accessible.